Manifesto Series: At Extremes

Job Captain, Andy Vann (along with colleague Jordan Carver,) presented a provocative and compelling manifesto linking contemporary architectural and political acts with the social space of dissonance and violence. Vann questioned architects’ own complicity in the unequal shaping of the modern metropolis and invited those in attendance to reflect on relevant and effective ways of confronting and fundamentally altering our speculative and exploitative urban economy.

Excerpt from press release - The condition of extremes suggests a tipping point: a moment in which a system shifts from one state to another (often unpredictable) state.

Manifesto Series: At Extremes discusses how architecture, infrastructure, and technology negotiate limits and operate in conditions of imbalance. Do the risk/reward models prevalent on the trading floors of global financial markets and in speculative real estate projects hold up in disciplines related to design?

How can the entangled relationship between risk and extreme conditions be leveraged in a new and productive model; one that emphasizes speculation as a way to test scenarios, outcomes, and tools? What is the role of design in such contexts? To document? To redress? To mitigate? To capitalize on new opportunities? Does the progressive destabilization of political, social, and environmental conditions render design more relevant, or less so? Link to more information

About Andy Vann

Andy Vann is an organizer, educator, parent and architect based in Brooklyn. He has taught at City Tech, City College and Columbia GSAPP.

Think about building a net-zero energy home with all its challenge except in remote regions with temperatures dropping to - 60 F for extended periods of time? As part of a graduate research, at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, Asok proposed a protocol that uses delivery of prefabricated homes to build affordable net-zero energy homes for Canada’s northern regions. As part of the research, 1200 homes built in the North since the 1950s were evaluated to study its impacts of energy policies on home. The findings were presented at the 7th International Building Physics Conference in September 2018 in Syracuse, USA.